Horizon 2 - Forbidden West State of play

[Catfood220]

Take your time Gueriila games, 2 or 3 years will do because I have a feeling that I'll have to buy a PS5 to get the full effect of this game and I'm not ready for that yet. Also can't get one even if I did want one because the scalpers have them all.

But yeah, this looks great. I am excited for this, I loved the first game and this looks like they haven't strayed too far from the formula. The combat against humans looks better which is a good thing. The glider looks fun, though its not surprising when you consider the first game was up against Breath of the Wild.

A couple of minor complaints, I see someone has been around painting all the climbable ledges yellow again. Aloy seems to have lost her adaptive armour from the last game, you'd of thought that after all the effort she put into getting it in the first game, she would be careful not to lose it.

Yeah, this is definitely on my watch list, if this was a new IP I'd be dubious but after the first game, I have full faith that Guerrilla can't fuck this up.

 

[BrawlMan]

Reactions:

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[hanselthecaretaker]

I will tell you Horizon broke my open world fatigue hell malaise if you will. Yes the robo dinos and future caveman setting really helped as opposed to metropolis with people and sky scrapers with horror dlc thrown in every now and then. But Horizon did something where less was more. Collectibles made sense not collect 200 whatevers get 20 of this 4 of that and it has nice lore attached. The zones were spread out just right and never did I get feel of vast open just for the sake of open. And the bow and arrow and hunting play I got from it side tracked me in a good way for hours.

As for the writing I personally love the in game lore and while the main story is not going to win awards it had me engaged with just the right amount of urgency and turns to make me invested to see how it all ends.

Yeah. It had its slower moments for sure with the narrative progression and the parts where you had to restore power to the bunker areas w kinda tedious, but the general machine hunting gameplay stood out to me as something new and interesting. They were just smart enough to keep you on your toes on higher difficulties, and using different tactics to take them down felt pretty awesome. Each one has mostly different strengths and weaknesses and using the various weapons to take them down is satisfying.

I wish I knew why people are so obsessed over this franchise. It's literally every open-world game in the last 10 years, with a different coat of paint and terrible writing. Is it the graphics and the robot dinosaurs? Because that's pretty much the extent of its originality. Everything else is generic open-world adventure game that we've seen a million times already.

Well yeah the machines are the biggest draw for sure but in terms of open world gameplay there’s not much else like them. The closest thing might be what, Monster Hunter World? But they’re nearly polar opposites in terms of combat responsiveness, intensity and tactics.



For writing, it may sound formulaic but the overarching plot ultimately has a worthwhile payoff, and the build up to finding out what happened is done in a thoughtful way that makes exploring the world feel justified. There’s a couple other videos of what went into the game that might help explain why it was good enough to spawn a sequel -

 

[Casual Shinji]

I mean, there's a franchise that's literally named for fighting giant monsters. Tho it's AAA status is highly debatable. Imo the latest entries are. They at the very least sell AAA numbers, tho that by itself is no indicator.

Yeah, but I don't think that franchise had a new entry for a long time before Horizon came out. Didn't Monster Hunter World come out in 2019?

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Reactions:

Max is like, “They just got chainsaws for a bottom jaw.” Yup, I didn’t notice that.

DF reacts -

I guess my other complaint about the reveal itself is the “gameplay deep dive” part at the end was really like, nothing we didn’t already see. I thought they would go into a lot more detail about new controls, platforming, weapons, melee combat improvements, robots, DualSense features, etc. but other than what we already knew we could do from the first game it’s just like, “She can climb more and has a glider now.”

I’m with Max about wanting to hear more of the technical stuff.

“It’s time to rap it up…”

Max: “Dammit!”

 

[Casual Shinji]

A couple of minor complaints, I see someone has been around painting all the climbable ledges yellow again.

I think they actually changed that up, only making it yellow when you highlight it with your Focus. It turns yellow once Aloy does her little scan, which is a nice compromise.

 

[Catfood220]

I think they actually changed that up, only making it yellow when you highlight it with your Focus. It turns yellow once Aloy does her little scan, which is a nice compromise.

Ok, I didn't notice that. I'll let them off this time

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I think they actually changed that up, only making it yellow when you highlight it with your Focus. It turns yellow once Aloy does her little scan, which is a nice compromise.

I'd welcome a more free form climbing system ala BotW, but even as it was Aloy controlled pretty much like a dream for what she could do. If they at least carry that over and offer a few more possibilities (which they appear to have) I won't complain.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I'd welcome a more free form climbing system ala BotW, but even as it was Aloy controlled pretty much like a dream for what she could do. If they at least carry that over and offer a few more possibilities (which they appear to have) I won't complain.

I like the inclusion of the hookshot, but I still wish they'd have a rope arrow that you could shoot in any surface and climb up.

That glider does seem to imply some more verticality to the open-world, but I'm already disappointed that we'll likely not be able to climb those tall buildings in the background or the remnants of the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I like the inclusion of the hookshot, but I still wish they'd have a rope arrow that you could shoot in any surface and climb up.

That glider does seem to imply some more verticality to the open-world, but I'm already disappointed that we'll likely not be able to climb those tall buildings in the background or the remnants of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I'll hold out hope, but not too much as it largely depends on how it would work as a gameplay setting.

Reminds me of something similar with God of War: Ascension where they released footage of that huge statue (Archimedes puzzle IIRC) and I posted on the director's Twitter something like, "Would love being able to climb that thing." and it got a thumbs up. Fast forward to release and yup, we were able to climb it.


Anyways, I forgot I had a Patreon sub for Digital Foundry, so I was able to DL the 4K video which has around 30mb/s bitrate. Unfortunately the webm program I have can't handle actual 4K conversions; it just exits out, but it can handle 1080. I'll be uploading around a dozen of them (along with the full 5.94GB video) to my Mediafire account as I find time to convert. My PC has an i7700 and it still takes several minutes for even 10 seconds worth, and some are twice that or more. I haven't found a site that hosts large video files for embedding.

MediaFire

MediaFire is a simple to use free service that lets you put all your photos, documents, music, and video in a single place so you can access them anywhere and share them everywhere.

www.mediafire.com

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Been so spoiled by photo modes this past gen I forgot how hard it is to get decent screencaps from video with all the post processing.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]